A Moral Panic? The Problematization of Forced Marriage in British Newspapers

Sundari Anitha1

Aisha K. Gill2

1University of Lincoln, UK

2Department of Social Sciences, University of Roehampton, London, UK

Sundari Anitha, School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln LN6 7TS, UK. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract

This article examines the British media’s construction of forced marriage (FM) as an urgent social problem in a context where other forms of violence against women are not similarly problematized. A detailed analysis of four British newspapers over a 10-year period demonstrates that media reporting of FM constitutes a moral panic in that it is constructed as a cultural problem that threatens Britain’s social order rather than as a specific form of violence against women. Thus, the current problematization of FM restricts discursive spaces for policy debates and hinders attempts to respond to this problem as part of broader efforts to tackle violence against women. forced marriage immigration policy moral panic problematization violence against women

Introduction

The specific forms of violence experienced by minority ethnic women had long been neglected both in the academic literature and in policy debates in the United Kingdom that have focused on violence perpetrated by partners and ex-partners. However, over the last decade increasing attention has been directed to the different manifestations of violence against women (VAW). This includes violence perpetrated by (primarily though not exclusively) male relatives from the wider kin group rather than just the immediate family such as so-called honor-based violence, dowry violence, and forced marriage (FM). Understanding the forms of violence experienced by minority ethnic women requires an approach that takes account of the continuities between different forms of gender-based violence while also addressing the specificity of particular forms of violence such as FM.

The UK government (HM Government, 2008) defines FM as a marriage in which one or both spouses do not (or in the case of some adults with learning or physical disabilities, cannot) consent to the marriage and duress is involved. Duress can include physical, psychological, financial, sexual and emotional pressure. (p. 10)

However, it is important to recognize that consent and coercion are not binaries; the social context within which consent is constructed is crucial to understanding coercive constraints. Consent and coercion can be better conceptualized as two ends of a continuum between which lie degrees of gendered socio-cultural expectations, control, persuasion, pressure, threat, and force (Anitha & Gill, 2009).

Unlike with “mainstream” forms of domestic violence, there is no official data on the prevalence of FM across European Union Member States (Rude-Antoine, 2005); there is a similar gap in our knowledge about the extent of FM in Canada, the United States, and Australia. However, FM has garnered significant media attention in recent years in a number of European states, though the American, Australian, and Canadian media have only recently begun to give prominence to stories concerning FM. Meanwhile, media debates in Europe have informed policy initiatives to address this problem; countries including Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom have recently created a specific offense associated with forcing someone into marriage rather than strengthen the existing criminal code that is applicable in the case of “mainstream” forms of VAW (Bredal, 2005; Rude-Antoine, 2005; Tzortzis, 2004).

This recent upsurge of interest contrasts starkly with the fact that FM and early marriage have been the subject of campaigning by women’s groups for several decades in these and other parts of the world. In Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa, Iraq, and rural China, where bride-price traditions lead many poverty-stricken families to “marry off” their daughters at a young age, women’s groups have supported policies and campaigns discouraging early marriage; they have also called for a minimum age for marriage to be established or, where such provisions already exist, for more stringent enforcement of existing laws and policies (Hague & Thiara, 2009). Algeria, Bangladesh, Jordan, Iraq, Malaysia, Morocco, and Turkey are among the countries that have raised the minimum age for marriage to combat FM. In most of these countries, the minimum age is now 18.

This article examines the representation of FM in British newspapers to illuminate (a) how this form of VAW is constructed by the media and (b) what sort of policy solutions these constructions both suggest and exclude.

The Problematization of FM

Foucault’s (1985) concept of problematization directs attention to the ways in which a problem comes to be framed and the implications of this framing for how the “development of a given into a question . . . transform[s] a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response” (Foucault, 2000, p. 118). By using this concept to “unpack” the construction of FM in British media discourses, the article aims (a) to examine the underlying and often implicit assumptions behind the construction of FM as a “problem” and (b) to understand how this problematization of FM influences policy responses to it. Analyses of media representations of crime and criminal justice policy have drawn attention to the framing processes whereby journalists use notions of selectivity and salience to organize their material in news reports (Entman, 1993; Reese, 2001). Framing determines not only how media content is shaped but also how it is contextualized in terms of the points of reference and latent structures of meaning that underlie the construction of particular media accounts. This simultaneously reflects and influences public perception of the issues at stake (McQuail, 2005).

Research indicates that print and television media have accorded disproportionate and increasing attention to crime over the past four decades, focusing especially on individual criminal incidents and their victims, rather than on patterns of crime or possible causal factors (Beckett & Sasson, 2000; Reiner, Livingstone, & Allen, 2003). Benedict (1992) and Shoemaker and Reese (1996) have identified the core socio-political and practical factors that affect the framing of news stories about crimes against women; these include conceptions of “what sells,” journalistic traditions, racism, sexism, class prejudices, sources’ biases, and organizational pressures and constraints. Mirroring press coverage of crime in general, reporting on VAW has increased since the 1980s; however, media representations of VAW and its victims continue to reflect dominant societal attitudes toward women and, thus, serve to perpetuate gender inequalities (Berns, 2004; Meyers, 1997). Media accounts of domestic violence typically exclude the concept of male accountability and focus on victims, who are (a) celebrated for having the courage to leave abusive relationships, (b) accused of instigating their abuse, or (c) held responsible for not escaping their predicament (Berns, 2004). Berns (2004) warns that although some of these frames have helped to foster support for victims through the development of legislation and the funding of shelters, they have not helped to “develop public understanding of the social context of violence and may impede social change that could prevent violence” (p. 3).

The crucial role of the media as an agent of moral indignation has been explored through the sociological concept of moral panic, which was developed in the 1970s by Young (1971), Cohen (1972), Cohen and Young (1973), and Hall (1978) to explain the processes involved in creating concern about a social problem that is disproportionate to the reality of the problem; this, in turn, serves to create a discursive space aimed at encouraging a shift in legal and social codes. The concern generated in a moral panic revolves around the identification of a specific threat that has the potential to destroy important social values, norms, and regulations. The identification of such a threat often catalyzes “a demand for greater social regulation or control and a demand for a return to ‘traditional’ values” (Thompson, 1998, pp. 8-9). Thompson (1998) notes that “in complex modern societies [a moral panic] seldom develops as a straightforward upsurge of indignation . . . there is a ‘politics of social problems’ or to put it another way, they are ‘socially constructed’” (p. 12); hence, moral panic reflects, and often reinforces, prevailing power relations.

In Cohen’s (1972) early conceptualization, the collective action that a moral panic triggers is marked by “mass hysteria, delusion and panics” (p. 11) that serve to focus public anxieties and fears on a specific category of deviants identified as “folk devils” (Cohen, 1972). Thus, the key ingredient in the emergence of a moral panic is the creation or intensification of hostility toward a particular group, category, or cast of characters. The “discovery” of the group seen as threatening or harmful to the sanctity of society as a whole is accompanied by a simultaneous oppositional repositioning of the rest of society as defenders of the society’s moral values. Thus, Rohloff (2008) points to the importance of changes in relative power ratios between groups not only as key to understanding the broader context within moral panics develop, but also as potential triggers of moral panic.Moral panic has traditionally been attributed to media and public formulations of the actions and practices of marginalized groups. Seldom have the actions of dominant groups come under similar media scrutiny, demonstrating the centrality of unequal power relations in moral panic. The concept of moral panic therefore has not been associated with media coverage or academic study of VAW. The absence of the concept of moral panic in the study of VAW was evident when a search for the term moral panic yielded one article each in the journals Violence Against Women, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and Trauma, Violence and Abuse. A similar search yielded over 100 articles in British Journal of Criminology and 21 articles in Criminology. One exception to this trend was when public anxiety was invoked and fueled by parts of the American media through sustained newspaper reports about “sexting” in 2008-2009, which has since been characterized as moral panic (Cumming, 2009; Lumby & Funnell, 2011). The key concerns that informed these debates were the regulation of teenage sexuality and the preservation of idealized constructs of childhood, rather than any possible concern about the gendered nature of sexual coercion in young people’s intimate relationships. In other words, this moral panic did not view the issue as centered on the prevalence of VAW. Cohen’s (2002, 2011) recent reflections on whether there can ever be a “good” moral panic (i.e., a folk devil that deserves such a reputation) is ideally suited to analyzing reporting on VAW should the issue ever become the focus of a sustained media outrage.

It is important to examine the media’s representation of particular crimes, and the groups they affect, because such representations shape the construction of these crimes as problems requiring a policy response (Franklin, 1999; Rochefort & Cobb, 1994). However, it is difficult to assess the precise impact of media representations of crime on broader attitudes because many people choose which newspaper to read on the basis of existing views, not vice versa. Although concerns about the impact of media framings on individuals’ attitudes to social issues are long-standing, this remains a complex subject and no definitive conclusions have been reached (Barker & Petley, 2001; Gauntlett, 1998). However, the link between media representations and policy making is more amenable to empirical scrutiny.

We do not deny that FM constitutes a form of VAW or that it deserves both media attention and public policy initiatives for its prevention and eradication. Indeed, the authors have long been part of campaigns and worked with organizations seeking to address such forms of violence affecting minority ethnic women in the United Kingdom. In this article, our focus is on the nature of media representations of FM in the United Kingdom and the ways in which this representation of FM opens discursive spaces for particular types of policy debates that suggest specific, often ill-advised, “solutions” to FM over other potentially more effective ones. These issues are illuminated through (a) quantitative analysis of news reporting on FM over a 10-year period, (b) qualitative mapping of dominant themes and concepts in newspaper articles on FM, and (c) textual analysis of a sub-sample of articles. The following four sections explore the key findings and the methods used to gather and analyze the data.

Data and Method

Four national newspapers were analyzed to explore how news reporting on FM developed between 2001 and 2010 and how the problem of FM was articulated during this time. Both conservative and liberal editorial perspectives were examined: the Daily Telegraph (including the Sunday Telegraph) is a right-of-center broadsheet, the Guardian (and the Observer) is a left-of-center broadsheet, the Daily Mail (including the Mail on Sunday) is a right-of-center middle-brow newspaper, and the Sun (and the News of the World) is a right-wing tabloid. The selection of a 10-year time period and a wide range of editorial perspectives allowed for quantitative analysis of the extent of reporting on FM and qualitative analysis of a large set of textual data. This provided a representative overview of media reporting on FM in Britain during the first decade of the 21st century.

LexisNexis (an electronic database of legal documents and archive of publications in periodicals, including all major journals, magazines, and newspapers) was used as a search tool to identify all the relevant news reports from the period. All stories generated by the terms forced marriage, forced marriages, and forced + marriage were examined. These searches also identified news reports that used the term forced into an arranged marriage; these were included in the data set. The search generated a total of 367 relevant articles. As LexisNexis does not provide any contextual information (e.g., regarding the placement of articles in editions) or accompanying pictures, these factors did not form part of the analysis. However, online comments posted by readers in response to some of the longer articles published on the newspapers’ websites afforded some preliminary observations about the reception of these articles, including whether the underlying framing devices were visible to readers. A detailed study that tests these observations about the reception of media discourses on FM would be a useful contribution to existing debates on media effects.

General Trends in Newspaper Reporting on FM

General trends in news reports on FM were mapped by collating the number of articles published on FM in the four newspapers over the 10-year period. This demonstrated the development of the media’s interest in FM and illuminated variations over time. Meanwhile, the comparison of the coverage offered by different media outlets afforded an opportunity to examine whether there was significant diversity or homogeneity between papers with regard to the extent of their coverage of FM and whether this changed over time.

The number of articles about FM published per quarter between January 2001 and December 2010 indicates an overall shift from lower levels of reporting in the early years of the decade to a sustained increase since 2006 (see Figure 1). There are three clear peaks in newspaper reporting on FM: mid-2001 to mid-2002, 2006 to mid-2007, and in 2008. The first of these periods was marked by increased coverage/mentions of FM in the context of debates on Britishness and cultural difference following the publication of the Cantle Report (2001-2002) on the urban disturbances in Burnley, Oldham, and Bradford in the summer of 2001. The increased coverage in 2006 can be attributed to the Labour government’s consultation on whether the act of forcing someone to marry should be made a criminal offense and the subsequent decision against criminalization. Following this consultation, media coverage remained high as the government went on to announce that specific civil remedies would be created to prevent FMs (i.e., through Forced Marriage Protection Orders) and to assist victims when a marriage has already taken place (i.e., via the other remedies available under the Forced Marriage [Civil Protection] Act 2007). The 2008 peak can be attributed to two high- profile cases of FM that occurred in the same year that these civil remedies came into force. In January 2008, an inquest was held into the then unsolved death of 17-year-old Shafilea Ahmed, whose body was found in a Lake District river a few months after she refused an arranged marriage. Later that year, significant media attention was directed toward Humayra Abedin, a doctor whose parents tried to force her into marriage and held her captive in Bangladesh until she was freed by a court order.

Figure 1. Newspaper reporting on forced marriage.

Sundari Anitha, and Aisha K. Gill Violence Against Women 2015;21:1123-1144

Copyright © by SAGE Publications The four newspapers’ coverage of FM follows similar trends, with similar peaks and troughs. However, every quarter shows some reporting on FM and, during the last 5 years, a relatively consistent level of reporting. The Guardian has the most consistently high coverage, while the Sun moves from very low levels of reporting in the early 2000s to higher rates in the later years of the decade.

In addition to the increasing levels of reporting over the last 10 years, FM has frequently been reported as a growing problem. Research commissioned by policymakers (Kazimirski, Keogh, Smith, & Gowland, 2009; Khanum, 2008) offers wide-ranging estimates of the number of cases in the United Kingdom; there is no media consensus on the issue, but newspaper reports suggest that there are between 3,000 and 10,000 cases per year (Taylor, 2008; Slack, 2008). One report even suggests that there could be as many as 17,500 cases per year (Lyons, 2008). However, it is only recently that statistics on FM have begun to be collated by the police and other statutory agencies. A widespread perception that this is a growing problem has been created through newspaper headlines such as “Tenfold rise in forced marriages in four years” (Daily Mail Reporter, 2009a). Given the historic lack of documentation, both recent initiatives to record cases of FM and the increase in the number of women reporting such crimes may have been (mis)represented by the media as indicating that FM is a growing problem.

The recent “newsworthiness” of FM is surprising given that the media have historically been less inclined to report on FM than on mainstream forms of domestic violence, just as they were more likely to report on sensational homicides rather than those arising from domestic violence (Peelo, Francis, Soothill, Pearson, & Ackerley, 2004). Abdela (2008) has noted the disproportionate headline coverage in British newspapers of street stabbings involving young people, while stories about women killed by current or past intimates tend to receive little coverage. Knife crime involving adolescents is often represented as a social problem through discursive strategies such as the “tallying up” of the number of deaths that year as each new murder is reported. Meanwhile, domestic homicides are generally represented as unrelated crimes, and so no such toll is recorded. Thus, the media tends to represent VAW as a private rather than social harm (Berns, 2004; Meyers, 1997). In this context, it is curious that FM has come to occupy center stage in media discourses on VAW in the United Kingdom.

Representing FM

The two authors coded the full text of each article to identify two core themes or concepts for each article. Coding a year’s worth of articles for each of the four newspapers yielded the initial set of codes; additional ones were created during the subsequent analysis of all the articles. At the end of the process, the researchers met to discuss discrepancies in their coding to reach consensus on how each article should be coded. This process yielded 24 themes and concepts (see figure 2a and 2b). These can be grouped into seven broad categories: (a) articles about the judicial disposition or policing of a specific case; (b) articles on individual victims and/or perpetrators that centered on the characteristics of victims and/or perpetrators, a theme found in many previous analyses of newspaper reporting on domestic violence (Wosniak & McCloskey, 2010); (c) reports that outlined policy and legislative developments; (d) reports on practical measures, including service provision, aimed at addressing FM and helping victims; (e) articles seeking to estimate the scale of the problem in the United Kingdom; (f) articles on prevention (a small, but defined subset); and (g) articles on the context, nature, and causes of FM. The last category included articles that discussed FM within the broader context of VAW or wide-ranging debates on community cohesion, multiculturalism, speaking English at home, immigration, Muslims/Islam, and minority communities and their culture and traditions, including arranged and transnational marriage.

Figure 2a. Themes and concepts in newspaper articles on forced marriage.

Sundari Anitha, and Aisha K. Gill Violence Against Women 2015;21:1123-1144

Copyright © by SAGE Publications Figure 2b. Themes and concepts in newspaper articles on forced marriage.

Sundari Anitha, and Aisha K. Gill Violence Against Women 2015;21:1123-1144

Copyright © by SAGE Publications The seven categories were not mutually exclusive. Indeed, some categories tended to overlap. For example, some articles reporting on particular cases of FM contained a brief factual outline of recent policy developments; others comprised longer features based on interviews with victims/survivors. During the coding process, the researchers decided to utilize two codes for each article to take account of such overlaps.

The overwhelming majority of articles fell under the final category on the context, nature, and causes of FM. Although articles in this category often offered the least detailed discussions of FM, examined collectively they illuminated the most common way of framing the issue. The contexts and causes that garnered most media attention were those that coupled FM with the following themes: Muslims and Islam, the problem of multiculturalism and/or the need for community cohesion, immigration issues, and issues concerning cultural traditions. Although FM was discussed as a form of VAW, it was more likely to be in the context of so-called honor-based crimes than as part of broader discussions about VAW or domestic violence.

Meanwhile, service provision for victims was rarely discussed. An article in the Mail on Sunday (2002) about FM and the lack of refuge spaces was a rare exception. Not one article found in the study detailed men’s experience of FM or discussed FM in the context of disability or sexual orientation. Prevention and preventive education received little attention across all papers, with comparatively more coverage in the Telegraph. All the newspapers paid comparable attention to victims and perpetrators, policy issues, and particular cases of FM.

A detailed qualitative reading of a sample of 16 articles per year, drawn from across the four publications, enabled a closer examination of prominent themes in the construction of the “problem” of FM and especially the representation of victims and perpetrators. This also allowed for an in-depth analysis of how these constructions open up certain discursive spaces for policy debates and practical developments while foreclosing others.

Framing FM as a Cultural Problem

This section examines the three main framing devices used to construct FM and the implications of these frames. The first frame concerns the portrayal of victims of FM. The second concerns perpetrators and their motives. The third revolves around the construction of FM with regard to assumptions about the contexts in which FM occurs and discussions about the causes of the problem and possible responses to it. Together, these frames convey broad messages about the nature of the “problem” and how it might be tackled.

Representing Victims

The first framing device, which centers on victims of FM, was most commonly found in news reports on individual cases and in longer articles, especially “survivor narratives”; these were most likely to be found in weekend editions or special supplements (e.g., the Daily Mail’s “Femail” or the Sun’s “Sun Woman”). Most described the victim’s experiences of FM (or the threat of FM), and then gave an account of how the victim escaped the threat/marriage, especially when this involved the police or the courts. Reports of this kind were primarily based on interviews with victims and, in some cases, on interviews with the agencies and professionals supporting the woman or working on her case; a number also discussed the relevant court proceedings.

Critically, the women at the center of these articles were portrayed as lacking in agency—as already and always victims of a deterministic culture (Narayan, 1997; Razack, 2004)—and/or as having made the journey from being victims of a deterministic culture to survivors who had distanced themselves from all aspects of their “former” culture. Women’s accounts of surviving coercive marriages or the threat of an FM were marshaled into narratives about how these women had reconfigured themselves through their struggles. These narratives were framed by the concept of otherness and often harnessed Orientalist tropes of the absolute cultural difference between victims’ former patriarchal communities and the liberated mainstream Western communities into which they had escaped. In a photograph of survivors of FM that accompanied a cover-story on the topic in the Observer (Seal & Wiseman, 2009), all the women were dressed in black clothes of European design, an image that emphasized the survivors’ distance from their original communities. In this article, one survivor, Sanghera, is quoted as saying, “My father didn’t leave his traditions behind at Heathrow” (Seal & Wiseman, 2009). The framing—and indeed, selection—of these narratives reinforces the commonplace view that migrants should abandon their cultural traditions, which are represented as the key cause of FM, to assimilate to Western cultural norms, which are unequivocally represented as privileging gender equality. In a celebratory account of a woman who survived FM, and then went on to marry her White boyfriend, the Daily Mail lauded the woman’s courage thus: “Today, she prides herself on being a thoroughly modern Englishwoman—and with her fashionably-streaked hair, elegantly-painted nails and designer wardrobe of must-have designs, she looks every inch the part” (Cable, 2006).

Survivors of FM speak out about their experiences to recover their voices, to make visible what has been rendered invisible, and to raise awareness about the problem (Ali, 2008; Sanghera, 2007, 2009). While recognizing the courage of these women, it is important to question why only some narratives are accorded space by the mainstream media. For example, Humayra Abedin, the doctor whose case occupied the front pages when she was rescued from a FM imposed by her parents in December 2008, was criticized for not denouncing her parents, whose actions she condemned but for whom she still professed love.

Constructing Perpetrators and Their Motives

The second framing device was primarily found in accounts of perpetrators’ motivations that focused on family conflict or “culture clash”; as a rule, articles that used this framing device constructed FM as an inevitable feature of traditional Asian culture, rather than as a form of VAW. Articles that used this frame frequently described perpetrators’ motives as stemming from the desire to help a relative or friend to immigrate to the United Kingdom on a spousal visa or to prevent the victim making an “unsuitable match.” However, the most commonly reported explanation of perpetrators’ motives revolved around cultural beliefs. For instance, in sentencing a woman to 3 years in prison for coercing her two daughters to marry their cousins in Pakistan, Judge Clement Goldstone, QC, stated that “those who choose to live in this country and who, like you, are British subjects, must not abandon our laws in the practice of those beliefs and that culture” (Narain, 2009).

These representations of FM are permeated with discursive strategies associated with moral panic. Perpetrators of FM were labeled deviants and the problem of FM seen as pervasive among such deviants—in this case, among all Muslims. In contrast, reports about domestic violence in White communities generally do not construct the problem as particularly widespread or, indeed, particularly disrespectable (Berns, 2004). In discussing preventive education, an editorial in the Telegraph (Telegraph View, 2009) argued that “While domestic violence is certainly an appalling problem, the evidence suggests that it is not a widespread one.” Despite persistently high rates of domestic violence, the problem is usually cast as an aberration in White communities. Perhaps not surprisingly, the sole exception to such a representation is its reporting within working class communities, capturing the all too common “exoticization” of this issue both in terms of class and ethnicity (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Meanwhile, specific forms of domestic violence common in minority communities tend to be depicted as the norm in these “deviant” communities (Anthias, 2013). Thus, whereas “mainstream” forms of domestic violence are generally represented through discourses focused on the pathology of the individual perpetrator, the majority of the news stories analyzed in this study used a framing device centered on the cultural difference of perpetrators of FM and their very normality within the context of what was constructed as the social norm for their community.

Reporting on a study commissioned by the Home Office to document FM in Luton, Taylor (2008) criticized specific minority communities for perpetuating “a wall of silence” around FM, despite the fact that Black and minority ethnic women’s groups have campaigned on FM, so-called honor-based violence, and VAW for many years. In contrast, the broad cultural norms and attitudes that foster tolerance toward gender-based violence are rarely evoked in reports on “mainstream” forms of domestic violence (Berns, 2004).

Constructing FM as a Cultural Problem

The third frame was particularly evident in news reports in which FM was coupled with the issues of immigration, minority communities (particularly Muslims), Britishness, the failure of multiculturalism, and/or the need for community cohesion. Such reporting peaked in the aftermath of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham, Burley, and Bradford with the publication of the Cantle report (2001-2002) about these events. Newspaper reports of this nature continue to appear on a regular basis, particularly in right-wing tabloids like the Sun and in the Daily Mail. Statements made by David Blunkett, the Labour Party’s former Home Secretary in 2001-2002, on the need for immigrants to learn English to integrate into British society, and the former Labour Home, Justice and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s criticism of the full-face veil in 2006 were widely reported in articles that invoked FM as a marker of cultural difference.

Similarly, FM is regularly invoked in discussions about the threat to “Britishness” posed by alternate marriage practices, including both arranged marriages and transnational marriages that enabled one party to immigrate to the United Kingdom (Doughty, 2004). The construction of an underlying moral problem and a folk devil that requires social control responses was evident in a headline from 2007: “End Arranged Marriages to Unite Britain” (Blunkett, 2007). Articles of this nature argued that stricter regulation of immigration was needed to curb FM: “If it is important to control the influx of migrants to preserve the stability of our society, it is even more important to ensure that those who come here learn to share with us a common sense of values” (Hastings, 2005).

There were three main types of news coverage about FM that used this frame. This included newspaper reporting that stigmatized immigrant communities in general, and Muslim immigrant men in particular, by constructing FM as a purely cultural problem and paying little regard to its connection with other forms of VAW. In the second type of article, the media blamed British multiculturalism, associating this with a fear of appearing racist in the face of cultural problems such as FM. Indeed, the persistence of FM was often perceived to be symptomatic of the failure of multiculturalism, a sign that attempts to “appease” Muslims/immigrants/minority communities are pervasive in policy and practice. Many articles that adopted this stance called for policy responses focused on cultural assimilation. The third type of coverage was far less common. In articles of this sort, FM was constructed as either a form of VAW or a specific (cultural) manifestation of a broader problem of VAW. Some articles that constructed FM in this manner were also critical of multiculturalism, arguing that it often results in a neglect of specific manifestations of VAW within minority communities and, therefore, welcomed the current attention to this problem. This position was primarily articulated by women’s groups, including many who were critical of the culturalization of FM within media and policy debates as well as those who welcomed the recent media and policy focus on this issue.

The representation of FM was far from uniform across the different newspapers. For instance, an overwhelming majority of articles in the Daily Mail and the Sun fell under the first two categories discussed above, as did a significant proportion of the articles in the Telegraph. Articles in the Guardian were more likely both to offer critical commentaries on the issues involved and to represent FM as a (culturally) specific form of VAW, though the first two approaches did inform a significant minority of articles in the paper. On the whole, the majority of media reporting on FM characterized it as a cultural problem.

The media’s framing of FM contributes to the perception that culturally specific forms of violence are more abhorrent than “normal” domestic violence and, hence, that they are rightfully subject to a media-driven moral crusade. These forms of VAW are “endemic abuse[s] of the worst kind” according to Wayne Ives, former Head of the Forced Marriage Unit (Beckford, 2008). Singling out FM as a particularly barbaric form of VAW not only trivializes “mainstream” forms of domestic abuse but also locates FM in an othered, unchanging, pre-modern world (Fernandez, 2009). These representations are not unique to the British media. Winter, Thompson, and Jeffreys, writing about the formulation of the term harmful traditional practices by the United Nations (a victory of sorts for campaigners who sought recognition for the gendered harms that the United Nations had hitherto been silent on), criticized the assumption that the “metropolitan centres of the West contain no ‘traditions’ or ‘culture’ harmful to women, and that the violence which does exist there is idiosyncratic and individualized rather than culturally condoned” (2002, p. 72).

Framing FM and forms of VAW that primarily occur in minority communities as more dangerous than mainstream forms of domestic violence also informs debates about possible solutions to these problems. Women’s groups have been critical of successive governments’ focus on criminal justice responses to what these groups perceive to be a larger social problem; indeed, the lack of attention to developing effective prevention strategies has been described as the “weakest part of the UK responses to VAW” (Coy, Lovett, & Kelly, 2008, p. 6). However, in November 2009, when domestic violence education was proposed as one possible response to VAW, a number of British newspaper articles were highly critical of this approach. Articles in right-wing newspapers sought to minimize both the prevalence of domestic violence and the need for preventive education in mainstream communities while stressing that domestic violence in minority communities (particularly FM and so- called honor-based crimes) were the “real” problems. According to these articles, these specific forms of VAW required preventive initiatives designed to tackle minority communities’ problematic cultures. A 2009 article with the headline “Honour Based Violence Is Biggest Problem Facing Women” (Whitehead, 2009) cited David Green, the director of Civitas (an independent think tank), who argued that the strategy was “skirting around the edges” of the real problem:

One of the dangers of having lessons to teach everyone from a certain age that it is wrong to use violence against women is that is implies that men are all a potential menace but that is not the problem we face. If you asked what is the biggest problem that women as a whole or particular women have at present, I would say the biggest problem is faced by women from ethnic minorities who are subject to routine violence.

Since acts of VAW in majority communities are perceived to result from the pathology of individual perpetrators (Berns, 2004), government attempts to tackle domestic violence have centered on punishing offenders through criminal justice responses. Viewing cases of violence against minority ethnic women through the lens of “harmful cultural practices” (Narayan, 1997; Razack, 2004; Volpp, 2000) has resulted in responses centered on bringing about changes in specific communities through “modernizing” these communities’ socio-cultural values, norms, and traditions—or, failing that, through using stricter immigration controls ostensibly aimed at defending minority women’s rights. In responding to an article on FM in the online edition of the Daily Mail, one reader argued that, “If they choose to live by other laws/customs that are not deemed respectable in British society, then they should be on the first plane back to their home land” (Daily Mail Reporter, 2009b). Thus, the framing of “mainstream” forms of domestic violence as separate and distinct from FM constructs these problems and their potential solutions in specific ways, eliding discussion of the fact that VAW occurs in all sections of British society.

From a Cultural Problem to the Problematic Culture

The frames discussed above are also evident in policy debates on FM, shaping the range of policy solutions that are discussed. In 2006, Anne Cryer (then Labour MP for Keighley) presented a memorandum to the Home Affairs Select Committee on Immigration Control outlining the problems, including FM and domestic violence, that she routinely dealt with in the course of her constituency work with minority communities. The memorandum referred to the “question mark regarding immigration on the back of a marriage of convenience” (Cryer, 2006, p. 3.5b) and framed the problem in terms of the “ghettoisation” of particular communities due to their lack of integration into mainstream British society (2006, p. 3.5f). Cryer cited consanguineous marriage, FM, and some immigrants’ inability to speak English as “tragic problems [that] are facilitated by intercontinental marriages which, in turn, are facilitated by weak immigration control and spouse entry” (2006, p. 3.5h). Critically, the broader problem of VAW is afforded no place in Cryer’s discussion or in the solutions centered on tighter immigration controls that she puts forward.

Reporters and policymakers have long identified FM as an issue concerning minority ethnic British women being forced into transnational marriages with men seeking to enter the United Kingdom on spousal visas. Following moves by other European Union countries to use border control measures in the name of tackling FM (Bredal, 2011), in March 2007, Liam Byrne (then Labour Minister for Immigration) announced proposals to raise the age of entry for spouses born outside the European Economic Area from 18 to 21. The press release about this move argued that it was expected to result in 3,000 fewer people entering Britain each year, though the potential impact on efforts to prevent FM could not be estimated (Ford, 2007). Prior to raising the minimum age of entry for spouses, the Home Office commissioned independent research on the possible impact of this change. The study raised concerns that this (a) could be perceived as discriminatory; (b) might violate human rights principles; (c) would not eradicate FM, as this affects people of all ages; and (d) would penalize those who genuinely wished to marry (Hester et al., 2006). The Home Office chose to ignore these findings; indeed, it was only following an application under the Freedom of Information Act that the Home Office released the full report (Yeo, 2009). In the end, the Supreme Court overturned the decision to raise the minimum age.

The Labour Government’s decision to ignore the recommendations of the research it had commissioned, and also the advice of some women’s groups working on the issue, is closely connected to its framing of the problem of FM. Viewing FM as a signifier of cultural difference suggests that eradicating or minimizing cultural heterogeneity through immigration control measures, and community cohesion strategies aimed at settled minority communities, will offer effective solutions to FM. Writing about Norwegian family reunification law and FM policy, Myrdahl (2010) argues that romance-based marriage has become central to constructions of the national subject, rendering some Norwegian citizens simultaneously invisible as national subjects and hyper- visible as objects of national management, irrespective of concerns about the potential for abuse within a specific marriage. In Britain too, FM, arranged marriage, and consanguineous marriage are often “lumped together” as markers of cultural difference that are contrasted with the norm of romance-based marriage. This serves to reinforce the boundaries of the nation in what Berlant refers to as the “privatisation of citizenship” (cited in Gedalof, 2007, p. 91).

Since 9/11, the problematization of ethnic differences has increasingly come to be articulated through rhetoric centered on the cultural incompatibility of immigrant communities. The notion of a normative form of “Britishness” places the onus on immigrant communities to adapt their cultural values and traditions to make them more like those of mainstream society (Gedalof, 2007). In these discourses, cultural incompatibility between minority and mainstream communities is attributed to the modes of cultural reproduction deployed by immigrant communities. Indeed, transnational marriages are often explicitly blamed for the persistence of immigrant cultures. Here, the problem of FM becomes uncoupled from issues of coercion and, through a focus on transnational marriages, comes to be posited as a “problem of continuous migration” (Migration Watch UK, 2009, p. 1). Bredal (2011) discusses a similar process behind the formulation of policies elsewhere in Europe whereby FM is constructed as a phenomenon that is “almost the same as” transnational arranged marriage or consanguineous marriage. These issues often supplant FM as the core theme in media reports and policy debates ostensibly about FM.

Conclusion

Analysis of the media reporting of FM reveals the three dimensions of “discursive construction” identified by Critcher (2009, p. 30) as central to the typology of a moral panic: a perceived threat to moral order, the potential for social control in the form of new legislation on FM as well as enhanced immigration controls, and the oppositional ethical reconceptualization of the mainstream majority as defenders of the rights of women from minority communities.

How useful is the concept of moral panic in understanding the problematization of FM within British newspaper reporting? In addition, how productive is this moral panic for tackling the very real problem of FM? Does it constitute a “good” moral panic as some women’s groups in the United Kingdom suggest? To apply the concept of moral panic, sociologists have adopted an apparently rational position that is actually representative of a broader affective attitude. It is one based on a voice that is grounded in “an attitude of knowing disbelief” (Garland, 2008, p. 21) toward the media and public construction of an issue as an urgent problem requiring a solution. The notion of a disproportionate and perhaps unhelpful overreaction to what, in some cases, might be a matter worthy of concern is central to the concept of moral panic. However, the difference between panic and concern is not always clear-cut; indeed, this has been the subject of many debates about whether a given case qualifies as a moral panic (Critcher, 2003). Cohen’s (2002, p. 2011) recent formulation of the notion of a “good moral panic” implicitly suggests the existence of a bad moral panic. As such, it offers opportunities to make explicit the affective positioning of those who attribute moral panic (i.e., sociologists) where this had previously been elided.

Another dimension of the moral panic debate concerns the consequences of such an attribution, particularly in terms of its usefulness in addressing the problem in question. As discussed above, the current moral panic about FM, as driven by British newspaper reporting, has significant consequences in terms of how the problem of FM is perceived and what policy responses to it are debated.

The prevailing construction of FM harnesses the protective role of the British state as a reformed patriarchy seeking to rescue minority ethnic women from their oppressive cultures. Through these discourses, the non-coercive marriage practices of Black and minority ethnic communities are also constructed as problematic in that they are perceived as (a) signifiers of minority ethnic women’s passivity, (b) impediments to community cohesion, and (c) part of a broader immigration “problem.” Thus, the key consequence of the media’s framing of FM has been the rationalization of tighter immigration control measures and policy developments that privilege cultural assimilation.

Scholars and women’s groups working with minority ethnic women in Britain are divided as to how best to understand and address the problem of FM. There are many women’s groups in the United Kingdom, including Karma Nirvana and Ashiana, who have contributed to the recent media debates on FM and have been supportive of the Coalition government’s policy initiatives on FM, including the recent criminalization of FM. From their perspective, any attention to this issue constitutes a “good” moral panic, as it helps save lives and acts as a corrective to the historic neglect by the media and the state of violence affecting minority ethnic women generally. Opponents to criminalization, however, tend to hold that the framing of FM in current news reporting does constitute a panic in that it is a disproportionate reaction when compared with the lack of attention given to other forms of VAW. Moreover, opponents of criminalization argue that it is a bad moral panic in that the solutions it fosters are, at best, ineffective and, at worst, centered on enhancing immigration controls rather than protecting women from violence. Despite their differences, advocates of both perspectives share a common identification of FM as an urgent problem that requires an immediate and effective policy response. Where there is specificity in women’s experience of violence, there is an urgent need to recognize, understand, and respond to that specificity. However, we argue that the recent media outrage about violence against minority ethnic women has not given rise to a better understanding of the ways in which intersections of gender, class, race, cultural norms, religious traditions, heteronormativity, migratory history, and state policies shape the nature and forms of violence that these women face. Nor have the recent media debates aided the development of context-specific solutions to the problem in the form of targeted service provision and preventive measures. The current problematization of FM by the British media mainly serves to restrict discursive spaces for policy debates and hinders attempts to respond to FM as part of broader coordinated responses to VAW.

Article Notes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Sundari Anitha, PhD, is a senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln, UK. Her research interests lie in two intersecting forms of violence within and outside the home: (a) violence against Black and minority ethnic women in the United Kingdom and India, prevention education on violence against women (VAW), and service and policy responses to VAW; and (b) labor market position of migrant women workers in the United Kingdom, industrial activism by migrant women workers, and politics of intersectionality (gender, “race” class). She has previously managed a Women’s Aid shelter, is active in campaigns on VAW, and is a trustee of a specialist shelter in London, Asha.

Aisha K. Gill, PhD, is a reader in Criminology at the University of Roehampton, UK. Her main areas of interest and research are health and criminal justice responses to violence against Black, minority ethnic and refugee women in the United Kingdom, Iraqi Kurdistan, and India. She has been involved in addressing the problem of VAW at the grassroots level for the past 16 years and has published widely in refereed journals such as Current Sociology, Feminist Legal Studies, Feminist Review, Journal of Gender Studies, and Women’s Studies International Forum.

References

↵ Abdela A. (2008, November 25). Stop looking the other way. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/nov/25/domestic-violence-gender

↵ Ali S. (2008). Belonging. London, England: John Murray. ↵ Anitha S., Gill A. (2009). Coercion, consent and the forced marriage debate in the UK. Feminist Legal Studies, 17, 165-184.

↵ Anthias F. (2013). The tropes of “diversity” governmentality: A significant face of contemporary racisms. Paper presented at University of Roehampton, March 2013. London, England.

↵ Barker M., Petley J. (Eds.). (2001). Ill effects: The media/violence debate. London, England: Routledge.

↵ Beckett K., Sasson T. (2000). The politics of injustice: Crime and punishment in America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

↵ Beckford M. (2008, November 21). Forced marriage cases up by 80pc this year as investigators find parents using “bounty hunters”. Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3496442/Forced-marriage-cases-up-by-80pc-this-year- as-investigators-find-parents-using-bounty-hunters.html

↵ Benedict H. (1992). Virgin or vamp: How the press covers sex crimes. New York: Oxford University Press.

↵ Berns N. (2004). Framing the victim: Domestic violence, media and social problems. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

↵ Blunkett D. (2007, August 8). End arranged marriages to unite Britain. The Sun.

↵ Bredal A. (2005). Arranged marriages as a multicultural battle field. In Mette-Andereson M., Lithman Y., Sernhede O. (Eds.), Youth, otherness, and the plural city: Modes of belonging and social life (pp. 75–106). Gothenburg, Sweden: Daidalos.

↵ Bredal A. (2011). Border control to prevent forced marriages: Choosing between protecting the women and protecting the nation. In Gill A., Anitha S. (Eds.), Forced marriage, Introducing a social justice and human rights perspective (pp. 90-112 ). London, England: Zed Books.

↵ Cable A. (2006, June 9). A forced marriage? I’d rather kill myself. Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-389831/A-forced-marriage-Id-kill-myself.html

↵ Cohen S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics. London, England: MacGibbon & Kee.

↵ Cohen S. (2002). Moral panics as cultural politics. In Cohen S. (Ed.), Folk devils and moral panics (3rd ed., pp. vii-xxxvii). London, England: Routledge.

↵ Cohen S. (2011). Whose side are we on? The undeclared politics of moral panic theory. Crime Media Culture, 7, 237-243.

↵ Cohen S., Young J. (Eds.). (1973). The manufacture of news. London, England: Constable.

↵ Coy M., Lovett J., Kelly L. (2008). Realising rights, fulfilling obligations: A template for an integrated strategy on violence against women for the UK. London, England: End Violence Against Women.

↵ Critcher C. (2003). Moral panics and the media. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. ↵ Critcher C. (2009). Widening the focus: Moral panics as moral regulation. British Journal of Criminology, 49, 9-30.

↵ Cryer A. (2006). Select Committee on Home Affairs: Additional written evidence. Memorandum submitted by Ann Cryer MP. Retrieved from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmhaff/775/775awe11.htm

↵ Cumming P. (2009, May 26). Children’s rights, children’s voices, children’s technology, children’s sexuality. Congress of the humanities and social sciences, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Retrieved from http://www.yorku.ca/cummingp/research.html

↵ Daily Mail Reporter. (2009a, December 6). Fear being branded racist and of offending minorities hampers social workers’ action over forced marriage. Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233660/Fear-branded-racist-offending-minorities- hampers-social-workers-action-forced-marriage.html

↵ Daily Mail Reporter. (2009b, July 2). Ten-fold rise in forced marriages in just four years. Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196955/Ten-fold-rise-forced-marriages-just-years.html

↵ Doughty S. (2004, September 22). Arranged marriages double in a decade. Daily Mail, p. 17.

↵ Entman R. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43, 51-58.

↵ Fernandez S. (2009). The crusade over the bodies of women. Patterns of Prejudice, 43, 269-286.

↵ Ford R. (2007, March 29). Visa rules will raise marriage age to 21. The Times. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article1914281.ece

↵ Foucault M. (1985). The use of pleasure: The history of sexuality (Vol. 2.). London, England: Penguin.

↵ Foucault M. (2000). Polemics, politics and problematizations: An interview with Michel Foucault. In Rabinow P. (Ed.), Essential works of Michel Foucault 1954-84. Ethics: Subjectivity and truth (Vol. 1, pp. 111-120). London, England: Penguin.

↵ Franklin B. (Ed.). (1999). Social policy, the media and misrepresentation. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

↵ Garland D. (2008). On the concept of moral panic. Crime Media Culture, 4, 9-30. Abstract/FREE Full Text

↵ Gauntlett D. (1998). Ten things wrong with the media “effects” model. In Dickinson R., Harindranath R., Linné O. (Eds.), Approaches to audiences: A reader (pp. 120-30). London, England: Arnold.

↵ Gedalof I. (2007). Unhomely homes: Women, family and belonging in UK discourses of migration and asylum. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33, 77-94. ↵ Hague G., Thiara R. (2009, March). Bride-price, poverty and domestic violence in Uganda. British Academy Review, issue 15. http://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/review/15/index.cfm

↵ Hall S. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. London, England: Macmillan.

↵ Hastings M. (2005, March 22). Immigration. Daily Mail, p. 12.

↵ Hester M., Chantler K., Gangoli G., Ahmed B., Burman E., Sharma S., et al. (2006). Forced marriage: The risk factors and the effect of raising the minimum age for a sponsor, and of leave to enter the UK as a spouse or fiance(e). Bristol, UK: University of Bristol.

↵ HM Government. (2008). Multi-agency practice guidelines: Handling cases of forced marriage. London, England: Forced Marriage Unit.

↵ Kazimirski A., Keogh P., Smith R., Gowland S. (2009). Forced marriage: Prevalence and service response. London, England: Natcen.

↵ Khanum N. (2008). Forced marriage, family cohesion and community engagement. Luton, UK: Equality in Diversity.

↵ Lumby C., Funnell N. (2011). Between heat and light: The opportunity in moral panics. Crime Media Culture, 7, 277-291. Abstract/FREE Full Text

↵ Lyons J. (2008, February 10). 17,500 forced to wed. The News of the World.

↵ No room at the refuge for Asian families in fear. (2002, June 9). Mail on Sunday. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-87164270.html

↵ McQuail D. (2005). McQuail’s mass communication theory (5th ed.). London, England: Sage.

↵ Meyers M. (1997). News coverage of VAW: Engendering blame. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

↵ Migration Watch UK. (2009). Immigration and marriage: The problem of continuous migration. Guildford, UK: Author.

↵ Myrdahl E. (2010). Legislating love: Norwegian family reunification law as a racial project. Social and Cultural Geography, 11, 103-116.

↵ Narain J. (2009, May 22). Muslim mother who forced her school-age daughters to marry their cousins is jailed for 3 years. Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1185589/Muslim- mother-forced-school-age-daughters-marry-cousins-jailed-3-years.html

↵ Narayan U. (1997). Dislocating cultures: Identities, traditions, and third-world feminism. New York: Routledge.

↵ Peelo M., Francis B., Soothill K., Pearson J., Ackerley E. (2004). Newspaper reporting and the public construction of homicide. British Journal of Criminology, 44, 256-275. Abstract

↵ Razack S. (2004). Imperilled Muslim women, dangerous Muslim men and civilised Europeans: Legal and social responses to forced marriages. Feminist Legal Studies, 1, 256-275. ↵ Reese S. (2001). Prologue-framing public life: A bridging model for media research. In Reese S. D., Gandy H. Jr.., Grant A. E. (Eds.), Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world (pp. 7-31). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

↵ Reiner R., Livingstone S., Allen J. (2003). From law and order to lynch mobs: Crime news since the Second World War. In Mason P. (Ed.), Criminal visions: Media representations of crime and justice (pp. 13-32). Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing.

↵ Rochefort D., Cobb R. (Eds.), (1994). The politics of problem definition. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

↵ Rohloff A. (2008). Moral panics as decivilising processes: Towards an Eliasian approach. New Zealand Sociology, 23, 66-76.

↵ Rude-Antoine E. (2005). Forced marriages in Council of Europe member states: A comparative study of legislation and political initiatives. Strasbourg, France: Council of Europe.

↵ Sanghera J. (2007). Shame. London, England: Hodder & Stoughton.

↵ Sanghera J. (2009). Daughters of shame. London, England: Hodder & Stoughton.

↵ Seal R., Wiseman E. (2009, January 11). Abducted. Abused. Raped. Survived. The Observer. Retrieved November 4, 2012 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/11/british-asian- forced-marriages.

↵ Shoemaker P., Reese S. (1996). Mediating the message: Theories of influence on mass media content. New York: Longman.

↵ Slack J. (2008, March 11). More than 3,000 Asian children vanishing from school and “forced into arranged marriages”. Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-530295/More-3-000- Asian-children-vanishing-school-forced-arranged-marriages.html

↵ Taylor M. (2008) Victims of forced marriages could total 4,000, says study. (2008, March 11). The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/11/gender.communities

↵ Telegraph View. (2009, November 26). This is no way to curb domestic violence. The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/6655761/This-is-no-way-to-curb- domestic-violence.html

↵ Thompson K. (1998). Moral panic. London, England: Routledge.

↵ Tzortzis A. (2004). Europe tackles forced marriage. Retrieved from http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0121/p07s01-woeu.html

↵ Volpp L. (2000). Blaming culture for bad behavior. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 12, 89- 116.

↵ Whitehead T. (2009, November 26). Honour based violence is biggest problem facing women. The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6655561/Honour-based- violence-is-biggest-problem-facing-women.html ↵ Winter B., Thompson D., Jeffreys S. (2002). The UN approach to harmful traditional practices. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 4, 72-94.

↵ Wosniak J. A., McCloskey K. A. (2010). Fact or fiction? Gender issues related to newspaper reports of intimate partner homicide. Violence Against Women, 16, 934-952. Abstract/FREE Full Text

↵ Yeo C. (2009). Raising the spouse visa age. Journal of Immigration Asylum and Nationality Law, 23, 365-370.

↵ Young J. (1971). The role of the police as amplifiers of deviance. In Cohen S. (Ed.), Images of deviance (pp. 27-61). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

↵ Yuval-Davis N. (2006). Intersectionality and feminist politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13, 193-209.